Body Image is a Furphy

ETA: Even though it was prompted by last week’s events, this post isn’t about Mia Freedman so much as it is about the position she represents.Â And while I think she was a little disingenuous in some of her comments, I’m inclined to believe that she didn’t see fat hate on her blog – not because it wasn’t there, but because it’s so naturalised as to be invisible.

This post is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, and the recent Mamamia furore has prompted me to finally post about it.Â My argument in a nutshell is this: Positive body image has never been for fat girls.Â It’s true that a lot of FA discourse focusses on body image and self-esteem – I think these things are valuable, and I’m not dismissing them when I say that positive body image has never been for fat girls.

The definition of ‘fat’ I’m talking about here is a bit contentious.Â For the sake of clarifying what I’m talking about when I talk about fat, here’s a definition from a paper I gave last year:

The fat bodies I seek to address are those that are â€˜fat enoughâ€™ to be visibly marked asâ€˜differentâ€™, and that are consequently routinely excluded in ways thinner bodies arenâ€™t.Â An arbitrary measure would be those bodies which are â€˜too fatâ€™ to find clothes in straight-size stores.Â Iâ€™ve used this measure because fashion and shopping are closely aligned with normative femininity in consumerist culture, and because this provides a clear material example of the ways in which fat bodies are excluded from particular spaces, practices, and modes of being.Â This definition is not intended to â€˜police the boundariesâ€™ of fat identity, but to insist on the centrality of the corpulent body which is otherwise marginalised.Â I also use this measure to differentiate between the normative idea that ‘all women think theyâ€™re fat’ and those whose bodies mark them as always already ‘abnormal’.

That’s what I mean when I talk about fat.Â And when I talk about body image, I’m talking about the mainstream discourse on body image (for which Mia Freedman is a prominent spokesperson).

Mainstream body image discourse has never had a place for fat girls.Â While it may claim to empower women of ‘all shapes and sizes,’ in reality, it only includes bodies which fit into straight-sized fashion.Â Freedman’s famous ‘Body Love Policy’ at Cosmo featured bodies ‘sized 6-16’.Â The Dove ‘real beauty’ adds are similarly limited in the size (and shape and age and skin tone and ability and other ‘deviations’ from beauty norms) of the women they feature.Â And The Proposed National Strategy on Body Image report which Freedman co-authored specifically excludes fat bodies:

When seeking to demonstrate good practice in their choice of models, organisations are encouraged to use models that are a healthy weight and shape (p40).

On p41, the report suggests that ‘for guidance on what is a healthy weight, organisations are encouraged to refer to the guidelines put forward by the National Health and Medical Research Council’ and provides two links (now broken, but I checked when the report was first published and can confirm that the documents referred to can now be found here) to the Australian Government ‘Obesity Guidelines’.Â The document to which the report refers is Part 3 – Measuring Overweight and Obesity (PDF), which opens with this sentence:

Obesity, or even overweight, in a person is generally not difficult to recognise.

So, we can tell which bodies are a healthy weight just by looking?Â It then goes on to detail different ways of measuring obesity, including BMI.Â The discussion of the problems in using BMI as a measure of someone’s body fat is actually quite good, but nevertheless, the purpose of the paper is to classify bodies as ‘healthy and good’ or ‘unhealthy and bad’ on the basis of size alone.Â The bodies which fall into the ‘healthy weight’ range by these measures are even less diverse than Cosmo’s 6-16.Â The recommendation to use ‘healthy weight’ models according to these guidelines hardly constitutes a call for true diversity in representation.

I remember being a size 20 Cosmo-reading teenager, and being so hopeful whenever the ‘perfect jeans for every size’ features came out.Â I desperately wanted a perfect pair of jeans to fit my body, and there were none to be found in my small country town.Â I was so hopeful, then so disappointed – and then so ashamed – that bodies like mine were still too big to be included.Â ‘Every size’ was never my size.Â I lived a body that was too fat even for recuperative ‘every body deserves self esteem’.

The body image discourse also serves to reify the exclusion of certain types of (even straight-sized) bodies from ideas of glamour and desire.Â To quote Rachael Kendrick (another scholar who is looking at fat, albeit in a very different way to me):

While I’ve no doubt that positive body image discourses and concomitant representational strategies do, in fact, assist some women in some ways, they also actively exclude other bodies, and in a way that can be more marginalising than standard representational practices.Â We all know that images of models are idealised and unattainable (even for models themselves), but when your body is excluded from ‘inclusive’ representation, what then?

Mainstream body image discourse seeks to redress (but at the same time, serves to reinforce) the normative idea that ‘all women think they’re fat’.Â Â To quote myself again:

I am explicitly not interested in discussions of â€œbody imageâ€ which focus on how the idealisation of an unattainable standard produces a dysmorphic self-image â€“ the tragedy of thin girls thinking theyâ€™re fat â€“ but has nothing to say about those whose fat self-image is not delusional.Â In these discussions, actual fat bodies cease to exist.

Except we do exist, and we continue to exist, and to work towards much greater goals than a compensatory ‘positive body image’.

11 Replies to “Body Image is a Furphy”

Thank you for this. Last week I mentioned on twitter that Mia Freedman’s brand of body image (which is the most commonly held brand too) excludes fat people. I really appreciate that you’ve fleshed this out (instantrimshot.com) because it’s something that needs to be brought to the attention of Ms Freedman and The Honourable Kate Ellis.

Hi Natalie! I missed your comment on twitter, but had a similar conversation with fatheffalump. It’s taken me a few days to write up what I wanted to say. I’m not sure that there’s any government-level progress to be made, considering they have an heavy (tee hee!) investment in ‘combating’ obesity. But I’m an old cynic, so…

I haven’t visited instantrimshot.com in a while, so I hope it’s not been overrun with bad stuff, but it used to be a button you’d press to get that “boom-tish” rimshot sound. I used to press it to make myself feel better when no one laughed at my jokes 😛

“I remember being a size 20 Cosmo-reading teenager, and being so hopeful whenever the â€˜perfect jeans for every sizeâ€™ features came out. I desperately wanted a perfect pair of jeans to fit my body, and there were none to be found in my small country town. I was so hopeful, then so disappointed â€“ and then so ashamed â€“ that bodies like mine were still too big to be included. â€˜Every sizeâ€™ was never my size. I lived a body that was too fat even for recuperative â€˜every body deserves self esteemâ€™.”

This is why I recently gave up reading woman’s magazines altogether. I too was a Cosmo and Cleo reader who was disappointed and embarrassed as a (late) teen, and I had the same problem more recently with WHO magazine. Don’t call it “every size” if it’s not “every size”. I wonder if anyone has considered suing them for false advertising or something.

That was really interesting to read. Thanks to @kissability for alerting me to it via Twitter.
Sizeoftheocean, I’m so sorry I made you feel that way as a teenager when you were reading Cosmo. It was the opposite of my intention…….really it was.

As I said in my ETA (not sure if it went up before or after you read), what I’m talking about is not so much about you personally as it is about a particular position.

I don’t think anyone’s positive body image strategies ever intend to harm, but I do think that genuinely fat (as much as that’s a problematic definition) bodies are so marginalised and/or despised that they’re not included in such strategies, and in many cases are actively excluded, which, intentional or not, can end up causing real harm.

To me, I always naively believed that positive body image was for everyone, but oh how I’ve come to realise that this is not the case. I first began to think it was about those that fit into “straight” sizes – 8-16 as most shops stock. However I can now see that it’s totally about how bodies look – there’s no scientific measure of how thin or fat “too thin” and “too fat” are. If someone looks too thin, or too fat, then positive body image is not for them.

Of course, how someone looks to one person, is different to how they may look to another.

At size 26, I am a fat woman, and am told repeatedly by strangers (on the street, and online) that I am fat and disgusting. But to my loved ones, I’m “not that fat” or “not disgusting fat”. That’s because they know me and care about me, so the line for “too fat” moves up somewhat.

Yet I know women half my size who are also told they are fat and disgusting by the same strangers, while their loved ones may think that I am the fat and disgusting one because she’s “not that fat” in reference to me.

Nobody should ever feel shame about their bodies. Not even those at the very extreme ends of the spectrum, not even those who engage in behaviours that are disordered or even damaging.

Every single being should learn to love, be able to be accepted for whatever body they happen to inhabit at any given time. Not be excluded by some arbitrary measure imposed by people that aren’t even stakeholders in their lives.

I love this. I’ve had similar thoughts but not been able to fully articulate them. What I find interesting is when fat women – (really fat, not magazine-fat) defend the notion that ‘healthy body image’ is about certain (thinner) bodies. In other words, display a great deal of internalised self-loathing. I used to do the same thing before I discovered Fat Acceptance and took a big reality pill. I think the pull of thin privilege is so strong that to not want to be in that club, or to not strive to be in that club, is just not even fathomable to many people. What I want to do, and what I think you’re doing here, is helping them to fathom it. And that’s so vitally important for those of us who will always be excluded.

And it’s also nice to know that here, outside the clubhouse, are a LOT of really interesting and cool people to hang with.